Lucy Smith, this year’s Heywood Fellow, says other countries may be leading the way
Short-termism, blind spots, lack of planning by the British state. These are not new problems. In his 1946 essay In Front of Your Nose, George Orwell wrote of the widespread habit in the UK of holding two contradictory viewpoints simultaneously. This, he said, was either out of political or policy expediency, or from a reluctance to face uncomfortable facts. His argument was not that the future is unknowable and uncertain. It is that we ignore things about the future that we know to be true, from a lack of appetite to confront them in the present.
We care about multiple outcomes, from looking after the planet, to navigating global geopolitics, to increasing prosperity and resilience, to modern and efficient public services. The complication for governments is that they have to deal simultaneously with immediate imperatives, ‘long’ problems like demographics and climate change and a multiplicity of intermediate timeframes for policy interventions from defence procurement to urban regeneration, where cycles might range from five to fifty years or more. All decisions create long-term legacies, the volume of inherited decisions far outweighing the sum-total of decisions any government will make. Even a basic IT procurement, designed to solve a problem now, can result in systems that are embedded in our digital infrastructure for decades. The problem is not just the short-term agenda crowding out the longer-term one – it’s understanding the interplay between the two.
In the UK we are not good at navigating these trade-offs, in part because we have been conditioned by a prolonged period in which short-term problem-solving and crisis management have embedded methods, routines and practices associated with decisions and action on short-term horizons. The methods, routines and practices that support bigger, long-term strategic thinking by governments have atrophied.
When we look beyond our own shores, other governments appear to be leading the way. Singapore is the world leader in strategy-making expertise. Estonia has, from necessity, mobilised a whole-of-society long-term approach to national security. The Republic of Ireland has mastered the use of small margins of advantage to become one of the most productive economies in Europe. Japan and South Korea are adept at making ‘big bets’ on the future, committing and mobilising national efforts to deliver impressive transformations. Spain has undertaken a long-term national strategy exercise España 2050, bringing academics, civil society, citizens and experts into long-term foresight and planning. We are being outpaced by countries who, while also having democratic and often adversarial political systems, view long-term national strategy as a core purpose of the state and a vital capability in securing the future.
We already know that the future is going to be different from the past, that over the next twenty years the global order will continue to shift, competition for natural resources will increase, the population will continue to get older, the technological transformation of the economy and society will continue to intensify and regional and intergenerational tensions will persist and potentially sharpen. Set against that outlook is our current predicament – current debt levels, NHS pressures absorbing available public sector growth and a requirement to build new defence capabilities.
This situation results, inexorably, in major choices. What size should the state be? What is a fair and durable tax base to support it? What risks should be private rather than public? How do we balance openness and resilience in our economy? What trade-offs will we make to support regional growth and development? Will we trade impact on the world for the quality and availability of public services? These are intensely political questions, but they require long-term horizons to solve. Waiting too long to address a problem, or only allowing ourselves part of the timeframe, inevitably leads to us limiting our options and choices. It results in poorer decision-making – either forced by crisis or by defaulting to paths of least resistance – when there could be real opportunities to scrutinise and revise embedded assumptions and do something new.
Politicians and policy-makers need new collective practices to meet future challenges. We require a collective understanding of what the world could be like in the long-term, the certainties and uncertainties we are planning for, the opportunities and benefits the UK is seeking and the risks and vulnerabilities it must navigate in pursuing its own proposed course of action. Alongside other democracies, we need to chart paths that extend beyond a single electoral cycle, and consider how this can be done.
With painful trade-offs involved, the temptation is to stick to shorter horizons, hope something happens to improve the choices available, or at least avoid falling foul of uncertainty. Chop up these questions into smaller blocks, answer the parts that are answerable now, take incremental steps, navigate public consent by searching out the paths of least resistance and adapt. Long-term strategies, it’s too easy to complain, are likely to be wrong, with attendant political, societal and financial costs. The role of the state should be to focus its activities and decisions within the electoral cycle, and to allow democracy – through political competition – to navigate horizons beyond it.
Those feel like reasonable rules for the policy-making machinery to follow, but we also know that such an approach – and this time-limiting view of the state versus democracy – has its limitations and downsides too. The state will overpromise or make contradictory commitments, and this itself bears costs. These costs might be hard to quantify but can be dear: to our global reputation; to our predictability and reliability with allies, trading partners, the private sector and delivery partners; to public trust in the state and its institutions; to the faith and ability of others to stick to long-term pathways.
In reality, the short-termist and the long-termist have an equal responsibility to the future. If the challenge for the long-termist is overconfidence in a solution to a problem whose dimensions might change and evolve, the challenge to the short-termist is the same. What assumptions are we banking on to make short-term solutions sensible with the known long view in mind? If we know we are extending a problem rather than beginning to solve it, what external events or interventions do we believe could be the solution, and are these credible possibilities? Both long-term and short-term strategies make assumptions about the future – one explicitly, one implicitly. Both represent timeframes and pathways for which the state and its decision-makers should be held to account.
In the course of my fellowship research so far, the team has spoken to politicians, civil servants, local government officials and representatives of the private sector, third sector and academia. During these discussions we found a huge appetite to think long-term but frustration that the machinery pulls in the opposite direction. In the UK, it seems, we can’t lift our heads to long-term goals because systemic barriers, from the churn of politics, to funding cycles to career incentives, push short-term announcements over long-term delivery. True, Parliament has recognised the long-term nature of the challenges facing the UK and has called for a profound rethink of siloed, short-term ways of working in government. Our cities and industries want a fundamental change in approach – a strategic partnership with government focusing on longer-term horizons, which enables them to compete globally and contribute to UK-wide growth, rather than competing with one another. It’s time for the UK to adopt a new approach.
Our next step is a deeper investigation into the examples and practices we have found internationally and in UK regions and cities. Our first published case study, España 2025 – Spain’s National Strategy, describes and discusses the approach of one of our near neighbours. We have also recently published our first working paper. In this paper, we argue for long-term national strategy to be recognised as a core purpose and practice of the state. We have set out to learn and define what a contemporary practice of national strategy-making, fit for the challenges of the next twenty years, actually is. Over the coming weeks we will be publishing more of our evidence base and working papers as we design and test an approach to long-term national strategy for the UK, seeking feedback and dialogue about its key components. The result, this autumn, will be a series of practical solutions for how to reintroduce this practice into government with the breadth, depth and openness of a national endeavour.
As Orwell suggests, we should hold ourselves to account for the things we simultaneously know and choose to ignore. Short-termist thinking might be as much a result of bias, expediency and institutional path dependency as it is about democracy, evidence or uncertainty. We know what is required to make ourselves better at strategy: to understand the world and ourselves, to grasp problems and set long-term and transformative goals, to confront trade-offs, to rethink the role of the state in relation to the future and to imagine better, more creative ways of achieving outcomes. We know that a lot of the time the structures, processes and incentives in our system do not lead there. We could ignore it and carry on as we are. Or we could decide it is time to try something different.
Lucy Smith is the third Heywood Fellow at Blavatnik School of Government. She was formerly Director General for Strategy at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
To read more about the Heywood Fellowship, and to access Lucy’s current working papers please visit https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/fellowship/heywood-fellowship
